A small 8 x 10″ oil painting by Canadian artist Harry Leslie Smith (1900-74) of Canadian Pacific’s second Empress of Canada at her berth in Montreal sold today on eBay for $419. The starting price was $9.99 and the painting attracted 43 bids. This was the ship in which I emigrated from England to Canada at the age of four, along with my parents and younger brother. I remember to this day my father holding my head out the porthole and telling me that this was our new land – and seeing the bleak, grey, rocky coast of Labrador in late October!

Coming back to the UK for good in 1992, the result of that voyage today is a London-based company called The Cruise People Ltd, which I formed to be able to allow the public to book the voyages that they wanted. We don’t just do cruises, our customers have sailed Round Antarctica, to the North Pole in Russian nuclear icebreakers, up the Amazon to Peru, to Australia in container ships, across the Northwest Passage in ice class expedition ships, across the Atlantic in tall ships – just ask and we’ll see what we can do for you, including the ultimate in luxury.

Along the way, in 1998, I managed to obtain a larger oil painting of the Empress of Canada by American artist Lawrence Blumenthal that today hangs in my office in London and shows her departing from Liverpool on one of her regular voyages to Montreal. This painting is joined by a Blumenthal miniature in oils of Cunard Line’s Carinthia, in which ship I returned to England at the age of eleven to spend a summer in North Devon.

For your own voyage of choice please call us on 020 7723 2450 or e-mail cruise@cruisepeople.co.uk and we will do our utmost to find what you are looking for, and if we can’t we’ll do our best to make alternative suggestions.